한국국제교류재단

Gu Byeong-mo’s Your Neighbour’s Table unpacks the story of four couples who join an experimental government program that addresses Korea’s low birthrate. In exchange for a unit in a new apartment complex, the couples sign a pledge, promising to do their best to bear three children.

We first meet the members of this community when Yojin and her husband, Euno, become the fourth couple to arrive. The complex, located in the countryside, is called the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments. But tension is already simmering among the residents, betraying the name.

Dahui, the self-appointed leader, is outgoing and proactive, but her concern for her neighbors often crosses the line into meddling and nosiness. Hyeonae, who chose to return to work as an illustrator shortly after giving birth, struggles to meet deadlines as she takes care of her daughter while her husband is at work. She has little time or energy to contribute to the community. Yeosan and Gyowon have their own personal issues, but in such a small group of families, nothing can stay secret for long. Meanwhile, newcomers Yojin and Euno find themselves not quite fitting the mold; Yojin works while Euno is a stay-at-home dad. This soon leads to an uncomfortable situation when Euno volunteers Yojin to drive Jaegang, Dahui’s husband, to work after his car breaks down. Jaegang’s joking with Yojin seems to tiptoe the line between neighborly banter and outright flirting, and she soon begins to question her judgment.

The novel casts a light on important issues in modern Korean society: the rising cost of housing in Seoul, the excessively low birthrate, and the government’s seemingly haphazard responses. Ultimately these issues constitute the scaffolding for more fundamental human questions: What does it mean to be a mother or a father, and what does society expect and demand of each based on traditional gender roles? How does life change after children? Is it true that you only become an adult once you have children, and that everything before that is just “playing house,” as Yojin’s friends claim? Pressures, biological and cultural, weigh heavily on the characters, but it is not always clear how much of each.

The community is like a petri dish placed under a microscope. What happens when a small number of disparate personalities are put together in an isolated location? Despite best intentions, cracks soon begin to appear. Will the residents be able to patch them, or will the cracks widen into fault lines that shake the foundations of their carefully constructed but fragile world?

No matter how pressing the larger social issues may be, society is ultimately about individual people having to get along with one another. Gu’s examination of Korean society writ both large and small will leave readers pondering what it means to inhabit various roles in our modern world — as an adult, a parent, and ultimately, a human being.

Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of 470 aphorisms from his creative writing lectures as recorded by his students. In these nuggets of hard-earned wisdom, the author speaks about poetry through metaphor and simile, often referencing fields outside poetry such as religion, philosophy, sports, science, and mathematics.

The five chapters of the book coalesce and interconnect roughly around five subjects: language, objects, poetry, writing, and life. Running beneath them is the author’s underlying view of poetry as something not deliberately or artificially created, but naturally emerging instead. More subtle ideas come to light the more one reads; the author repeats himself many times, each time from a different angle and with a different perspective. Like raindrops, each aphorism may pass in a moment, but together, they are able to bore a hole through even a stone.

The final chapter in particular contains a lode of life wisdom that is unrelated to poetry — or is it? Only when approaching the end of the book does the reader realize that the path is not a straight line from “language” to “life” but in fact a circle. A single reading will introduce the author’s philosophy of poetry, but multiple readings will reward the patient reader with a much deeper understanding.

Lee Seung-yoon first came into the spotlight at the 2011 MBC College Music Festival, later carving out a place for himself in Korea’s indie music scene. But it was his victory on JTBC’s “Sing Again” — a show spotlighting overlooked talents that began airing in 2020 — that truly brought him into the public eye. Lee’s music is a raw, genre-blending collage: Britpop, hard rock, heavy metal, and punk are all tossed onto the chopping board and hacked apart, then reassembled to bring out the beauty of Lee’s lyrics.

Lee’s third studio album, YEOK SEONG (2024), is a culmination of his artistic evolution. Drawing on existentialist philosophy, his lyrics pose weighty questions, leaping like a fish over a torrent of stormy rock tempos. His songwriting is often confrontational, battles waged within and against the world. Refusing to accept ready-made truths, formulas for success, or prescribed ways of living, he shakes his head and challenges these constructs.

Spanning 15 tracks and running over 64 minutes, YEOK SEONG is nothing short of an epic. The title track, “Anthems of Defiance,” sets the tone with a fierce vocal performance and thunderous band created energy, layered unexpectedly with crisp strings. It’s a rallying cry to revolution — to reclaim a buried soul and a trampled spirit. The album then winds through acoustic pop ballads and raw punk rock before reaching a peak with “Waterfall,” a surging six-minute onslaught. From the gentle opening notes to the final track’s descent into manic drumming, Lee proves himself to be a rarity in today’s music scene: the kind of artist who paints with bold strokes on a massive canvas. He goes beyond assembling songs to building a world, layering a wide range of musical textures into something greater than the sum of its parts.

With this album, Lee took home three major honors at the 2025 Korean Music Awards: Musician of the Year, Best Rock Song, and Best Modern Rock Song.